Planet Vectorworks

While the concepts students learn in the classroom are valuable, there’s no substitute for the real-world experience that design competitions provide. Competitions are great because they let emerging visionaries test their skills and interact with working professionals, and receiving a prize at the end doesn’t hurt, either.

Architectural students from the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) in the Dominican Republic, as well as the University of Tokyo and Tokyo University of Science in Japan, collaborated with Vectorworks users and industry experts from around the world during Build New York Live, a collaborative, virtual design competition held over 48 hours. Their team, BIM Unlimited, used non-standard geometry and BIM workflows to integrate structural analysis, MEP design, external windflow analysis, and 4D construction scheduling into a single global design. The resulting 60-story residential tower and multisport community outreach arena in Lower West Manhattan won the competition's “Best Use of BIM for Sustainability or Constructability Award.”

Team BIM Unlimited's submission to Build New York Live.

“The fact that we worked with a team of over 20 people from around the world to produce a project in a such an accelerated way was just amazing,” said Dominican students Ibsen García, Alfredo Cuello, and Ramdel Guerrero. “We ended up understanding how similar the workflows are in other countries compared to the Caribbean and what the demands are on other professionals in the architecture and construction field. We had no limits on the collaboration process since everyone was working in the cloud, which was really liberating. Everything just worked as it should, and we never had any issues.”

While the students in the Dominican focused on creating the building form's massing models, students from Japan used FlowDesigner software, which communicates with Vectorworks Architect via IFC file exchange, to run an airflow analysis, simulating the wind patterns over the site based on information from existing buildings and weather data. The team, comprised of students Prudsamon Kammasorn, Tatsuya Karube, Shuya Morita, Tomohiro Yamamoto, and Hideaki Yoshida under the leadership of doctoral student Yasin Mohamed Ibrahim, used windflow analysis to directly impact the building’s design. This impact includes the creation of the sports arena's distinctive, vertical-louvered façade, the setback core of the residential tower's ground floors, and the placement of trees in the landscape design, which reduced the wind velocity at the corner of the building facing the ocean.